Love Not Exclusively In Realm Of The Young

February 23, 1987|BY DAVID STEINBERG, Syndicated Columnist

The February-March issue of Modern Maturity magazine nominates for its Most Ageist Movie Executive of the Year Award an unnamed producer who asked a 70- year-old scenarist if she thought she could write a love scene.

This column is for that producer.

He ought to know that ``Old ladies take as much pleasure in love as do the young ones,`` as Abbe Brontome wrote in Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies.

Maybe that producer hasn`t loved enough to realize that ``there exists a timeless need of all humans for intimacy, love and meaningful relationships. A feeling heart and responsive body know no retirement.`` Those wise words come from Dr. Ollie Pocs of the American Association of Sex Educators.

NO LIMITS ON LOVE

In time, the producer will realize that ``we never lose interest in sex and loving if we`re healthy.`` Dr. Mary Calderone, a great-grandmother, told me that several years ago when she was president of the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States, which is affiliated with New York University.

There is no age limitation for loving and being loved. In A Good Age, Alex Comfort tells us, ``If at 80, we can `love,` in any of the disparate senses of that word . . . there is something or somebody with whom we retain human engagement.`` He adds, ``It probably takes the assaults of time to make us truly value this capacity`` to love and be loved.

I am convinced that love knows no age limits. On a personal note, last summer I went to New Jersey to help my older brother after the toes on his right foot had been amputated. I drove him to visit his wife, who is in a nursing home.

My brother`s wife is a bright, tall, handsome woman, who is a former swimmer and dancer. But Parkinson`s disease has immobilized her and she`s in a wheelchair. Now gaunt, head bent wearily, only her dark, luminous eyes reminded me of the woman I knew. In her barely audible voice, she scolded my brother for coming to see her instead of taking care of his foot.

``Look at her,`` my brother said. ``Even in her condition, she worries about me.`` He turned away so she wouldn`t see him sob.

Wasn`t that a love scene?

DIVIDENDS OF AGING

If, by a love scene, the producer means a passionate, sexual encounter, he should learn the facts of love presented in Love, Sex and Aging by Edward M. Brecher (Little, Brown). Over a five-year period, Consumer Union assembled the personal experiences of 4,246 men and women aged 50 to 93. One 65-year-old widow Brecher quotes said, ``Young people should know that sex is not only for the young . . . quality - not quantity - counts. There are many dividends to aging.``

A 66-year-old widow with a 62-year-old lover wrote, ``I have learned more about sex in the past three years than in the preceding 63.``

When Dr. James Breen was elected 34th president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecology, he told members: ``Residents and students are more inclined to think of the elderly patient in terms of the 70-year-old lady they saw with terminal cancer than the 70-year-old widow who is planning to be married and would like sexual counseling.``

The producer ought to know about the French writer Colette. The hit movie Gigi was based on her short stories. Although bedridden and arthritic before she died at 84 in 1954, Colette inisted: ``Love has never been a question of age. I shall never be so old as to forget what love is.``